


Painting the Future

by Fuzziestpuppy



Series: And Still a Garden [1]
Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 4
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Historical, Ancient Kyrat, Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Fairy Tale Style, Getting Together, Kalinag and His King, Kyrati Mythology, M/M, Romance, Shangri-la
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 17:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18287216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuzziestpuppy/pseuds/Fuzziestpuppy
Summary: Kalinag tells a tale of when the world was new, a tale of journeys and destiny and mighty battles.  Of love, and coming home again.





	Painting the Future

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, [brokibrodinson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokibrodinson/pseuds/brokibrodinson), [hitsuaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitsuaya/pseuds/hitsuaya), and [Thegirlnamedhawk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thegirlnamedhawk/pseuds/Thegirlnamedhawk) for being such wonderful beta readers. You guys really are the best.

***

 

This is a story that happened long ago when the world was new, a tale of journeys taken and mighty battles and destiny and love. Of homecomings. The story of when I was a young man, a warrior of great renown.

 

I was the youngest of the King’s protectors. I had seen but twenty-seven summers, so to earn my name at that age was a great accomplishment. I had given up much else in my single-minded ambition: I had no child to carry on my name, no family of my own, and this occasionally troubled me. But I had the friendship and camaraderie of my fellow warriors and the warm regard of the King himself, which was worth more than gold.

King Bhagan had been our ruler for my entire life and I had seen him often, but the first time I met him personally was when he gave me my name and blooded me in the ceremony himself, a great honor. As I knelt at his feet on the rough stone of the temple floor, he waved away the priest that offered the ceremonial gold blade on a cushion and drew his own. The kukri was so well-honed that when he slid the tip of the blade into the skin of my chest I hardly felt it. He moved my family’s amulet aside and anointed his elegant fingers with my blood, and as he said the words drew them across my skin.

“Today, I name thee Kali Nag, the Black Snake that guards the House of Minh from the serpents that would harm it. My House, this Palace, and indeed all Kyrat. Stand, and be counted amongst my warriors.” The other warriors roared and stamped their bare feet as he pulled me up into an embrace that pressed our chests together, also a great honor. When he let me go, I stared at the sight of my own blood smeared across his paler skin, across the gold of the King’s amulet he wore. He didn’t seem to even notice, but I felt it like a brand, a bond that connected us. As he gripped my arm and raised it in triumph to the crowd, he called out in his fine voice, “Let the feasting begin!”

 

The King himself was a mysterious man, one said to be given to reclusion and fits of temper. It was also said that when he was a very young man, at the beginning of his reign, a great famine stalked the land and killed many. Disease followed as it often does, and even royalty are not immune to it. The King’s young wife and baby daughter were carried away with it and the rumors were that he went mad, that was never the same after; harder, crueler, with a raw edge to his anger.

But that was long ago, and time has a way of wearing the sharp edges off a man’s grief. I was but a tiny child myself during those years. By the time I met King Bhagan, he honored his warriors and cared for the populace and was unfailingly kind to me.

 

Much later, as the feast in the Palace was in full swing, he found me and drew me down to his own cushions to speak with me, waving away the servants so we could have privacy.

“Well my boy, my Kalinag…how does it feel?”

“Your Majesty, it is an honor beyond words.”

“Hmm, I don’t know about all that, but please, call me Bhagan. I feel…” He looked away for a moment, as if suddenly unsure. “I feel as if we are well on our way to becoming friends, don’t you think?” The soft smile on his face was one I had never seen before, but it was quickly gone as he seemed to remember himself. “In any case, what would you ask of me?”

I was confused, and it must have shown on my own face. “I don’t understand, Your…Bhagan.”

“It’s customary for the King to give the new warrior gifts…so what would you have of me?” He waved a hand airily at the laughing guests, the platters of food, the dancing girls and musicians. “The finest wines? Women? Any delicacies not already on offer?”

I thought this over. “No, none of those things.”

“Ah,” he said softly, watching the dancing for a moment. “Well, they’re not really to my taste either. There was only ever one woman for me, my boy,” he said quietly, contemplatively, an ancient sadness in his voice that I found myself wanting to soothe away. And then he threw back his head and laughed hard, surprising me. “Oh, forgive a maudlin old man! I may have had a bit more wine than is entirely prudent!”

Bhagan called himself old, but he wasn’t. True, his face bore the lines of time, of laughter and sorrow and sun, but he did not allow himself to grow indolent as the King. He may have reached his middle years but his body was still as hard and strong as a young man’s, albeit with scars here and there. The kinds of scars from great battles that I myself had yet to earn. His dark hair, worn short, had not a touch of silver in it yet. His fine pink and gold sarong wrapped snugly around his trim waist with hardly a wrinkle, his kukri secured by a golden sash. The blade had some embellishments but was plainer than I thought it would be; a true weapon. My own blood still marked his broad chest, and I realized I was staring rudely and snapped my eyes back up to his dark, kohl-ringed ones. He watched me calmly, gently, unoffended by my gaze. He leaned forward and touched my knee, almost a caress.

“I wish you would ask something of me,” he said. “It would salve my conscience, for what I must ask of you.”

“My King, I have trained my whole life to be a shield on your arm, a weapon in your hand. I need no trifles. Merely tell me what you need me to do, and I will see it done. It would be a great honor, which is all the gift I need.” He frowned a little at those words, and I wondered what it was that I had said wrong. “My…Bhagan, did I misspeak somehow?”

“No…no, my boy. Spoken like a true warrior.” He smiled at me, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “But I’m afraid that I must send you on a journey into terrible danger. Lately, I have lost many of your fellow warriors, some of my best. But not to battle, oh no. I’ve lost them to Shangri-La…or the search for it, anyway.  As I'm sure you know.” His tone was equal parts confessional and bitter. “I gave them my blessing…how could I not? They wished to seek out the mysteries of the world, perhaps of the universe, though I leave those questions to the priests. Who was I to stop them? But not one, my Kalinag, not _one_ has come back.” He rubbed at his face, pushed his dark hair out of his eye. “So now you know the gravity of the task I set before you. Find a place that may or may not even exist, one possibly fraught with Banashur knows what sort of peril…and come back. Only that. Go, see if you can find any evidence of your fellow seekers, and then come _back_ to me.” He moved close to me, close enough for me to smell the incense caught in the silk of his sarong, the wine he’d been drinking, as he looked deeply into my eyes. “Ordinarily I would never ask it of you, as untried as you are…but you really are the best of them all.”

A sense of untrammeled joy filled me at the idea of being awarded this task. The honor really was immense, whether he even realized it or not. A King is beyond the thirst for glory.

“Your Majesty, I will do this gladly,” I said, letting him hear how happy he’d made me. “I will find this place and be as your eyes and ears and return to you…or die trying.”

“Please, boy…Bhagan, Bhagan. ‘Your Majesty’ makes me feel so old. And none of this dying nonsense…that, I _absolutely_ forbid.” That surprised a laugh out of me as he leaned back, looking pleased with himself. “Here, have a cup with me before you go. Just one more, hmm?” He waved a servant over who promptly brought the goblets, pale gold wine in shining golden cups. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted, that wine from the King’s table. It was flavored with my triumph, but the company was even better. “My Kalinag,’ he said in his warm, precise voice, “what is your name, your given name? It was remiss of me not to ask it sooner.”

“Ajay, my…Bhagan. It is Ajay.”

“Ah, a good name. A common one, but it suits you. A good, strong name…I like it! Bhagan and Ajay.  Ajay and Bhagan.” He sipped at his wine with a warm smile.

 

A little later, he walked with me down the Palace steps and out into the gardens, seeing me off himself. “How did the other seekers begin their journeys?” I asked him. “I think perhaps I should retrace their steps.”

“There is a _dhami_ in the high mountains, far to the north. He resides in Durgesh, the mountain fastness. Seek him out…and take this.” He pressed a ring into my palm, one of his own, still warm from his hand. He pressed it there until my own fingers closed over it, gently brushing his. “Use this to requisition whatever you need for the trip; food, clothing, fine weapons, anything. All will know you go with my blessing. My blessing, and my…my regard.”

We parted as warriors greet and say farewell, with our foreheads pressed together. But rather than grip my biceps as was customary, he held my face instead. His warm hands cradled my head, brushing against my ears, his elegant fingers threading into my hair. An unexpected intimacy, made more so when he nudged at my nose with his. “Do this for me and when you return,” he whispered, his breath against my lips, “I’ll give you anything your heart desires.”

“Oh?” I said, a little teasingly. It was surreal, to speak with him thus in the warm velvety dark. “Anything, you say? Are you sure you want to invest a lowly, untried warrior with such power?”

“Gladly,” he said. “I see that you are a man unwilling to take too much advantage of his poor King. Think on it.” His voice became serious. “May you also go with Kyra’s blessing. The place you seek is her realm, and it’s rumored that it is stained with her blood. Oh, be careful, so very careful, my Ajay, my Kalinag. Don’t you _dare_ die on me.”

With that, he let me go. He turned abruptly and strode away like he didn’t wish to see me leave, his hands clasped neatly behind his back. He left me there with my feet in the cool dust of the path that would lead me to my destiny. It looked like an ordinary garden path; like any of countless others around the Palace, but it was one that _he_ led me to. I watched him go, the moonlight silvering his bare shoulders, his hair as he ascended the steps back to the Palace.

I watched him all the way to the door, saw it safely shut behind him, as any good protector should.

 

The next day, I set out on the road to find my fate, the journey to prove my worth.

I needed nothing but what I stood in; I was as skilled in woodscraft and hunting as I was a fighter, and so didn’t require Bhagan’s ring for provisioning. It fit well enough on my finger but I soon took it off and threaded it onto my amulet for safekeeping, in terror of losing it. I was determined to see it safely back to him. His last parting words had rung like a bell in my mind, even though he’d whispered them: _Don’t you dare die on me._

As I hiked into the foothills, I thought about him. He seemed drawn to me, and I to him, but that could be dangerous. To be a friend of the King was to invite calamity. Kings were not like ordinary men. They were like elephants who must be very careful of where they walk, lest they crush lesser men beneath their feet. Or like a tiger who, even while being playful and friendly, may still cause harm with their sharp claws and teeth.

I thought about these things, but I also thought about the way he had touched me, like an old friend, like we’d known one another for years. By the end of that feast, it had felt a bit like that too. It touched a part of me that I hadn’t even known was so lonely.

I thought of him as I walked, I thought of him that night by my tiny fire in the forest, I thought of him as I woke in the early gray light, warmly wrapped in my sarong against the morning chill. I knew then, what I would ask of him as a gift. Even as I acknowledged the audacity of it. If he were even willing to give it…but I thought he might. If I could survive this task he had reluctantly given me, unwilling to put me in harm’s way but needing answers.

With this settled in my mind, I rolled over comfortably and went back to sleep until the warm sun had dried the dew and taken the chill from the air.

 

Travelling lightly and quickly through the South, I reached the mountain fastness of Durgesh in four days. The mountains slowed me down more than I would have liked, as I had to find shelter from storms more than once, but I eventually reached the place.

Durgesh was like an elegant warren, a huge mountain tall enough to scrape the sky with the entirety of the inside carved into passages and shrines and large assembly rooms for prayer, into cells for monks and visitors. Every niche housed a god or a skillfully wrought _thangka_ painting, every wall shone with light from countless butter lamps. I looked about in wonder until one of the priests asked my business there.

I showed him Bhagan’s ring. “I come seeking answers on behalf of the King. Answers about Shangri-La.”

“Ah,” the man said. “You are young, to be a seeker…but very well. I will take you to the _dhami_.”

This man was one of the oldest I had ever met, a true sage. His wizened hand patted at the back of mine in greeting, his fingers worn smooth with age.

“The path to Shangri-La is actually quite easy to find and walk, even for a brash young man such as yourself. What is difficult, however,” he warned me, “is getting back again.”

I thought this over. “I had that figured, Honorable One,” I said politely, “as none of the other seekers have shown up again.”

“Pert as well,” he said, and clucked his tongue at me. “Shangri-La has a way of making a man forget what he’s there for, like getting lost in a dream. What you must do is always anchor your mind to a thought of home…and hold it there steadily. This will lead you back. But have a care; the longer you stay, the higher the likelihood that you will lose your way.”

“That sounds…reasonable,” I said carefully. “The King merely wishes for me to go and look and come back, to try to seek out what happened to the others. What must I do?”

“If you are sure that this is the path you must walk, then follow me,” he said, and tottered away down yet another stone corridor. And of course I did follow him. This passage led up, and up, and _up._ We walked up stairs and sloped tunnels until I was gasping, my legs trembling under me. The incline was never very steep, but I was unaccustomed to the height, the thin mountain air. I drew it into my chest in great draughts, lungs sobbing and wishing for the soft misty air of the lowlands. The _dhami_ turned his wrinkled and kindly face to me.

He wasn’t even breathing hard.

I marveled at his stamina, and when I found the breath to tell him so he gave me a serene and enigmatic smile and continued on, leaving me to catch up to him as I could.

The achingly long corridor finally terminated in a large chamber at what must have been the very top of that great peak. The sight that greeted me stunned me and had me staring for a long time. For in that bleak place the brothers were growing _lilies,_ the giant chamber full of them. An opening in the ceiling let in the sun, and it boggled the mind to think of how long it must have taken them to carry the earth up that winding passage, one basketful at a time. The patch had to be at least twenty _haath_ wide.

“Come, come,” the old man said, ushering me in. At the center of the lily patch was a stone slab, as high as my knee. The monks had me lie down on the rough stone, and one brought white paint. They carefully worked designs on my skin designed to open my chakras, they said, and while they worked one brought a colorful _thangka_ and unrolled it.

“Now,” the _dhami_ said, “all you must do is breathe deep of the scent of the lilies, stare into the _thangka_ , and imagine yourself flowing into it.”

“Into the painting?” I said dubiously.

“Yes, my young seeker. And as you do this, never forget this world. Choose a memory and imagine it like a rope to lead you home. It is your lifeline.”

I knew what my rope home was. The memory of Bhagan and I with our foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s breath, our toes in the silky dust of the moonlit garden path. I made that soft memory as real as I could, a thread of fate that tied us together.

The reality of holding the thought of one place vividly while willing oneself to be in another turned out to be…disorienting. Increasing that sense of disorientation was that the cloyingly sweet smell of all those lilies was beginning to make me feel dizzy, as one of the monks held up the picture of Shangri-La for me to stare into. Just like Bhagan had told me, the trees and grass were all rendered in colors red as blood, Kyra’s blood. A stray beam of sunlight streamed over the man’s shoulder directly into my eyes, which seemed to grow brighter and brighter the longer I looked into the _thangka_. Brighter still, as I squinted into the glare that blotted out the man, the painting, everything until there was nothing but white light.

Suddenly, I felt a tug somewhere around my midsection, a pulling deep inside myself, and I instinctually grasped at that rope in my mind, the one that would lead me back to Bhagan. I seized it desperately…and opened my eyes on a whirling snowstorm and a voice whispering in my head to leap, leap into Shangri-La.

Not really knowing what else to do, I summoned my courage and did just that…and found myself in an impossibly beautiful land of warm gold sky and blood-red trees, just like the _thangka._

 

Many, many hours later I woke on the stone slab, cold and gritty under my back, my head pounding like a macaque was making a drum of it.

The wrinkled face of the _dhami_ hove into my field of view, also much like a macaque. “Our young seeker returns!” He chuckled. “How was Paradise?”

“Like a child’s story come to life. Gorgeous,” I admitted, my voice rough and croaking. “But it’s in great danger.” Those memories flowed back into me like the tide, dreamlike. I remembered the bell, chained and yearning to be free. The sky tiger. The demons. All of it.

The seekers. I touched my chest cautiously, and all four necklaces were safe there, along with Bhagan’s ring. Bhagan.

I gingerly levered myself off the stone slab. “I must return to Bha…to the King at once,” I said. “Honored Brother, how many days have I been gone in that place?”

“Why, about ten minutes,” said he, with a gentle smile.

 

Such was my haste to return to the Palace that I ate nothing on that return trip. I barely drank, only such rivulets that ran past the road, and I stopped only to sleep in snatches. In this way I made my return in less than three days, but I paid for it. By the time the attendants showed me into the King’s chambers, I was filthy and wobbling, hardly fit for a royal audience. I told them so, but they assured me that they were under strict instructions to bring me right away, and so they more or less dragged me into his chambers and dumped me on a thankfully soft rug.

Bhagan had been lounging on a stack of nearby cushions and reading a scroll, and it rolled unheeded to the floor as he sat up in shock. He had not expected me back for weeks.

“Ajay! What…”

With trembling fingers, I removed the seeker’s three amulets from around my neck and laid them at his bare and elegant feet. It felt like an immense weight was lifted from me, much greater than their actual weight. “I fear they were lost, your warriors. They lost their way, intoxicated by Paradise. They…they lost their thread, but I held to mine…” I hardly knew what I was saying anymore, I was so exhausted. I must have been dreaming awake, because there was Bhagan, kneeling in front of me like a common man, kneeling and brushing his hand through my shaggy, dirty hair. Not like a King at all. Like a friend. That was the last thing I remembered, before the dark dragged me down.

 

Voices around me, like a babbling stream. One stood out, warm and familiar but sharper than usual. “Well go on, leave the cloth and the basin right there, imbecile! I’ll take care of things…”

A warm, wet, sweet-smelling cloth was dragged over my bare skin, cleaning me. My hands, my torso, even through my hair. When the cloth started in on my face, it roused me enough that I could open my eyes, and there he was. Taking care of me, which was very wrong. I quickly shoved myself to a sitting position and almost fell over again as a wave of dizziness overcame me.

I was so dry my tongue had ceased to even stick to the inside of my mouth. I tried to ask him, “May I trouble one of your servants for a drink?” But what came out was “…drink,” barely recognizable. He reached for the side table and offered me a goblet, the very one he had been drinking from. I was touched, but the cup held unwatered wine. I shook my head. “Water, please,” I managed to croak, and he got up and fetched it himself. I wished he wouldn’t. It was like the natural order of the world reversing itself. Nevertheless, he was the King and could do as he wished, even if that meant not behaving as a King. This conundrum made my already dizzy and pounding head worse, so I shoved it aside.

After I had gotten a couple of good gulps of cool water, I felt much better. Bhagan laughed. “Such a temperate young man!”

“Hardly,” I said. My voice was rough, but usable. “Only a very thirsty one.” That made him laugh even harder for some reason. I started to try to tell him about the wonders that I had seen, but I was still so tired that the cup tried to slip out of my fingers. After watching me nearly lose it twice, Bhagan took it from me.

“It can wait, dear boy. Come with me, I’ve had a proper bath run for you, if you can promise me you won’t drown yourself. And then you’ll have a bite to eat. And then sleep, for as long as you want it. I’m not going anywhere, and Shangri-La surely isn’t either.”

One of his servants unwound my sarong for me and I climbed in the huge bath and scrubbed twice all over roughly, to keep myself awake. The same servant tried to dry me, but I took the cloth and did it myself as he brought me a clean garment. One of the King’s own, as it turned out. “I can’t…” I started to say, eyes wide, but the man overrode my objections and slung the fine silk around me, wrapping it expertly.

“He does you great honor because you’ve done a great thing for him and lifted a heavy weight from his heart. So eat his food and wear his clothes with gratitude and stop complaining,” the man said archly. I decided to do just that, and took his advice and shut my mouth. I was really too tired to object anymore anyway, by that point. I took a few bites of the _roti_ that a servant handed me and laid down complacently as a child when someone else backed me up against a soft bed.

I might have been asleep before my head hit the pillows.

 

I woke to the morning sun streaming golden light through the window, making the dust motes dance. I was utterly confused by that light, as it had been late afternoon when I had arrived at the Palace. I looked around me at the huge bed I laid in, hung with fine gauzy draperies. Someone was playing a _sitar_ nearby, softly and not half badly. When I craned my head to see who it was, my eyes met Bhagan’s as he plucked the instrument, seated cross-legged in the corner. I had slept half the day and all the night in the King’s bed.

“Ah, you’re finally awake,” he said cheerfully, laying the _sitar_ aside and rising. He sat down near me on the bed and tucked his legs neatly under himself again. I sat up to speak with him.

“Bhagan, forgive me,” I began, but he waved a hand.

“You’re about to apologize for sleeping in my bed, aren’t you? Nonsense. I put you here myself and slept right here beside you last night. Nothing to apologize for, when there was no inconvenience.” His fingers caressed my knee, much like that night at the feast. “Have you given any thought as to your reward?”

I blushed at that, not expecting the question to come up quite so soon. My skin was a few shades darker than his, but the heat still showed in my cheeks and ears. I knew that he could see it, for he outright grinned. With the way his eyes turned up a little at the corners, it made him look very much like a mischievous boy. But I was a warrior, and not given to cowardice. “I have,” I said steadily.

“Oh?” he said, still with that teasing grin. “And what have you decided on?”

“I’d like a kiss,” I said mildly.

Whatever it was that he expected me to say, it wasn’t that. His handsome face sobered, something like speculation in his dark eyes. “If that is the reward you truly seek,” he said slowly, “well…I believe I can oblige.”

In the Kyrat of long ago, men sometimes kissed each other on the cheek or on the forehead in affection if they were brothers, or especially close friends. We had not known each other long enough for it, and it was incredibly presumptuous of me to ask it of the King, but that was the reward I sought all the same. He did say I could ask for anything. I sat up straighter as he leaned close, as he rested his hands on my shoulders. My own rested easily on my thighs. I closed my eyes for it.

They snapped open again as his lips gently, gently nudged at mine.

I nearly jerked away from him in shock, but held myself steady as something, some warm, fluttery sensation filled my stomach. I had never been kissed in such a way before, something reserved for…for lovers, for what men and women share. His eyes were closed too.

The rumors were true; he really was a mad King.

Whatever he sought by pressing his lips against mine seemed to elude him, however, as he stopped nudging at me, merely rested his mouth against mine for a few more seconds. But as he pulled away with a tiny, frustrated sigh, I found myself reaching for him. Without thinking, caught up in something I didn’t understand, _I put my hands on the King._ This was not done. By anybody. No one but his immediate family had permission to touch him so, and in an earlier era I might have been executed for it.

But King Bhagan, instead of tearing away and swinging at my head like I half expected, pushed his torso into my hands like he wanted more of it. In wonder, I stroked my hands up his well-muscled sides, and he groaned in pleasure. That sound shot more of that warm, fluttery sensation through me, but this time it went straight _down_. Bhagan swayed forward until our foreheads were touching, my hands still on him.

“I am drawn to you as a moth is drawn to the flame,” he murmured, confessional. “I don’t understand it.” No anger or distress in his tone, but perhaps a touch of pain. I thought back to that night of the feast, of hearing that old, old sadness in his voice and my wish to soothe it.

“I don’t understand it either, but I feel it as well. I also…” I had to swallow, my throat dry. “I have not the slightest clue what I am doing,” I told him, warned him, as I tilted my head and brushed my mouth against his.

The effect was instantaneous. He surged up under me and I surged to meet him, on our knees in the middle of his bed. A dim and distant part of me asked what in the name of Banashur did I think I was _doing,_ but it was mostly silenced by his hands on me in turn. He ran them warmly up my bare back and held me hard to him, but his mouth was still gentle and sweet on mine. This time, his kiss felt like that fluttering condensed into hot flame that jolted through me, and my lips parted a little in surprise. “Oh,” I may have said, or made some such involuntary sound.

“Oh Kyra,” he groaned out…and touched my bottom lip with his very _tongue,_ warm and wet and shocking and…

Exquisite.

It was my turn to groan, and want more. My hands shook as I cupped his face with them, like he had done to me that night in the garden. Had he wanted this even then? I didn’t know what I would have done that night if he had held me thus, held me and licked slowly, hotly into my mouth. I concentrated on meeting his tongue with my own. I was clumsy about it but it didn’t matter, not when we were stoking flame, not when he shifted against me and I could feel his satiny skin rub against mine, his heart pounding against mine, his hardness pressed against my hip and readily apparent even through layers of silk.

No, I had no idea what I would have done that night. But the journey had changed me in ways that neither of us could have predicted. Thoughts of him had been my lifeline in that place, a red thread, a garden path leading me home. _Kismet._

As gently as it had begun, he slowed that kiss back to the merest press of his lips, letting that heat between us sink down from a blaze to a bed of hot coals. With a last little rub of his mouth on mine he withdrew, just enough to look at me. His dark eyes sparkled as his chest rose and fell with his hard breathing, flushed and...beautiful, my still stunned mind helpfully supplied. He was beautiful to me like that. I was in much the same state of arousal.

“Was that the gift you sought,” he asked with that teasing tone.

“Yes,” I said honestly, “though I did not yet know it.”

“I am so glad that I could adequately reward my most esteemed warrior,” he said with a chuckle. “Here, lie down with me and tell me all about your journey. It exists? Shangri-La is a real land?”

We lay down together, facing each other, and he tucked an arm around me and stroked my back as I ran my own up and down his side, rubbed circles into the vulnerable, velvety skin of his belly. The excitement was palpable in his voice, but I wasn’t sure if my words were what he wanted to hear. It would have been easier if I had been blessed with a glib tongue, a penchant for lying. No, not a lie; persuasion. I could never outright lie to him, but lying there beside him so close that I could smell the good, warm scent of his skin, sharing the same pillow…this compelled the utmost honesty.

“It’s as real as a dream is real, and yet not. I entered that place like sliding into a dream, and the memories of what happened feel like those of a dream, and yet…” I told him everything: finding the sky tiger, a protector from another world. Of the _mani_ wheels seemingly made for giants, the great bronze likeness of Kyra so large that her outstretched hands scraped the sky. His eyes grew wide as I recounted these wonders. “So I was able to free the bell, jerking pitifully at its chains. Those demons had done it, the ones with the masked faces. The tiger and I killed them all, every last one, if kill is even the right word. Unmade, might be more accurate. But nevertheless, they could not stand against our fury. Though the dagger I plucked from the tiger’s shoulder didn’t come through to this world, I was able to carry the amulets back with me.”

“This tale is…it’s so fantastic that it’s difficult to wrap the mind around. But what of the seekers who wore them? What fate befell them?”

“They were as people frozen in time…frozen at the very moment of their deaths. Are they aware of what’s happened to them? I do not know. As to what made an end of them, I do not know that either. The _dhami_ told me they had lost the thread back home.” The memory of the shock and fear captured on the faces of men I had known so well, their staring, white rimmed eyes made me shiver a little. I was no stranger to death and bloodshed, but to see it captured eternally in such a way had been disturbing.

Bhagan’s eyes were thoughtful. “Warriors dream of forever around the campfires at night, but I very much doubt that’s what they envisioned. Well, at least now I know what happened, which is a great weight lifted off me. That place killed them, but at least I can return their amulets to their poor families. I shall send a letter to the _dhami_ telling him not to allow anymore of the warriors to try going there again. I should have forbidden it in the first place.”

This wasn’t going well at all. “I have to go back,” I blurted out.

He stared at me. “Go back…why, whatever for?!”

I swallowed. It was so hard to explain, to make him understand. I brushed my fingers over the freckles on his shoulder, gathering my thoughts. Just then, my stomach rumbled long and loudly, making Bhagan chuckle. These were important matters for us to discuss, essential even, but I was a young healthy man who had run for nearly three days straight with nary a bite to eat. He removed his arm and patted my chest, and I found myself missing his solid warmth against me almost immediately. “Come, food first. You must be absolutely famished, dearest boy. You’re far, far too thin.”

Servants brought us a wonderful meal, dish after dish, each more delicious looking than the last. He insisted that we sit across from each other at the low table and we ate from the same platters like equals. When he did these things it still disturbed me, but I was growing more accustomed to his odd ways. He kept sneaking choice tidbits from his plate onto mine when he thought I wasn’t looking, and I pretended not to notice. Once he was finished, he tore a piece of _roti_ into small pieces and carried it out into the garden while I took the opportunity to polish off the last of the rice and _daal_. I finally sat back with a contented sigh.

I joined him there, out in his beautiful walled garden. I walked past the carved stone columns of the porch and into the bright sun and dappled shade of mango trees and the smell of sweet flowers. Near the burbling fountain I found him feeding the birds, some of which were downright brave around him. One, a little green parrot, would sit in his very hand and take the bits of flatbread from his fingers. “‘Gan, ‘Gan,” it said in a funny little voice, which amazed me. It regarded Bhagan with its bright beady eyes, turning its head to look at him first with one, then the other.

“Yes, little one, it is your Bhagan,” as he offered another piece. “Fat, greedy little one,” he told it affectionately, as he spread the rest of the bread for the others.

I walked up behind him and brushed my fingers along the small of his back. This too grew to be nearly second nature so, so quickly, this putting my hands on him. As always so far, he pushed back into me to show his appreciation, always desiring my touch. I didn’t know what to make of it.

He had a reputation for having a fierce and capricious temper, to be so quick to anger, but I never saw it. I trusted my instincts as I looped my arms about his waist. I trusted that I could tell him things that he wouldn’t like, that I could always touch him like this. He turned in the circle of my arms, and as he did so his little green friend fluttered up to perch on his head as he wrapped his arms around me. Bhagan rested his head against mine and the parrot seemed to decide that no more food was forthcoming, for he gave me that beady-eyed stare and flew off to sit on a flowering vine instead.

“Bhagan,” I whispered against his hair. He kept it short enough on the back and sides of his head that it prickled against my lips. It made sense to me. It ensured that no enemy could seize him by it, jerk his head back to try and cut his throat. “Bhagan, I have to go back there. It’s all in terrible danger and I must protect it, as I protect you. The tiger and I…we must stop the flood of demons into Paradise. It’s doing its best to protect itself, but it needs help.” I held him in his lovely garden and willed him to understand.

“Why must this be _your_ task to do?” Bhagan said, slightly muffled against my throat. “Oh, I don’t understand any of this. Anything.” He might have been speaking of more than just Shangri-La. “It’s a wonderful story, but…”

“I swear to you, it is no mere story. I don’t know why or even how I was chosen to be a protector of Paradise…but I do know that when I freed that bell, my heart sprang free with it. The sound it made was the…the _rightest_ thing I have ever heard. But that was only the beginning, you see. The bells protect Shangri-La, but the demons have worked out how to neutralize that threat by trapping them…and so they must be freed. Even now the thought of their captivity, it…it tugs at my mind. Bhagan, I fear that if I cannot stop them they will pour into _this_ world.”

He pulled back enough to look into my eyes, frowning a little. “But how do you _know_ all these things, about demons and bells and tigers from other worlds?”

“The wind whispers to me. It tells me these things, helps guide me to where I need to go, understand what I need to do.”

“The wind,” he said flatly.

“Bhagan,” I said, “even the very air of that place has magic in it.”

He was quiet for a long time, merely holding me, and I held him back. All this was obviously upsetting to him, so I remained quiet and let him think it out as I rubbed soothing circles into his back. In a way, to be standing like this, touching him and kissing him like a lover would was far stranger than anything Shangri-La had to offer.

What were we? What we did went past any brotherhood, any bond of friendship. _Were_ we lovers, then…or at least on the path to it? Was that his intention? I had no intentions myself, merely running on instinct, on…desire. It felt good to be here like this. No, wonderful, to be here with him like this. My head whirled with questions that I didn’t know how to ask.

Finally, he raised his head from my shoulder again. “I wish,” he said softly, as he brushed a thumb along my eyebrow, my forehead, “that this paradise was enough, the paradise that I have the power to give you.” He gestured around us. “But if you tell me you must do this thing, why, I believe you. I _trust_ you. Even if I don’t understand it. Go and do as you must, darling,” and I blushed a bit at that endearment. “Oh, were I able to go with you, to take to the roads as your companion!” He was mostly jesting, but there was a tiny hint of wistfulness in his voice as well. “But alas. I’ll be here waiting for your return, your King caught in a gilded bower, ha! Much like that green rascal over there.” The rascal in question seemed to know when he was being spoken of, as he left his perch to swoop back onto Bhagan’s head. “‘Gan,” the bird said with squeaking, clicking dignity as it ran its beak through his hair. Bhagan waved it away absentmindedly and it moved to his shoulder to play with his earring with little darts of its curved beak. He sighed. “At least stay for a few days. You need rest and good food. Only the best delicacies for you, dear boy. Young men, you always think you’re without limits…I am not yet so old that I don’t remember how it is! But you must take _care_ of yourself. I insist on it.”

Part of me wanted nothing more than to lie down in his comfortable bed and sleep for a week and let him feed me dainties, but… “Time is not the same in that world. There, I spent many hours fighting to free the bell, but when I woke, a mere ten minutes had passed. I worry that two days is as many weeks there,” I said.

Bhagan looked at me with a touch of that old sadness in his eyes. “Please. For me. Please.”

It twisted my heart in my chest. He did not order me, he did not command me, no; he _asked,_ he pleaded with me. The urge to return to Shangri-La was strong enough that I had wanted to set out in mere hours…but for Bhagan, for my King, I found myself nodding, and his eyes brightened.

 

I took my leave of him not long after that, as I had duties as a warrior to attend to. My good friend Acheh happened to be in the barracks-yard tending to his weapons, along with Bagh and some others. They had not seen me since the ceremony and the feast and were understandably curious. But something held me back from speaking of the real reason for my quest. I remained vague and merely said that the King had asked for me to courier messages and that I would be gone a great deal. Not entirely a lie; I fully expected to carry Bhagan’s letter to the _dhami_ when I left again. Even this assignment of delivering the King’s correspondence was a great honor indeed, especially for one such as I and Acheh congratulated me excitedly. But it seemed as if there might have been jealousy in the eyes of some of the men far senior to me.

As I lay in my narrow bunk in the barracks that night with my arms folded under my head, I thought about how different it was than the night I spent before. How much had changed in only a few short hours. I thought about Bhagan beside me and what it might be like to sleep in his big bed with our arms around each other. To kiss him awake in the morning. Thoughts of what else we might do I pushed down. Things were too unsettled between us to even let my mind drift that way, and I was in the middle of the crowded barracks in any case. I needed to focus all my attention on my mission so that I could come back alive to him. I hadn’t spoken much of that part of it but I had the intuition that there would be incredible danger before all was said and done. I needed all my wits about me so that I could survive, so that we could have time to figure out how things lay between us.

 

The next morning, I went out into the courtyard to spar with the others in the gray dawn. My muscles were still sore from my long run back, and the hard exercise was just the thing to drive out the remaining stiffness. At some point I glanced up and realized that Bhagan had come out onto his balcony overlooking the courtyard to watch us. This was something he did from time to time, on no regular schedule but whenever the whim took him. I had the feeling that he was there mostly to watch me, as I could feel his eyes on me, his warm regard.

It wasn’t surprising that he was there watching, but what surprised us all was when he faced the seam of gold light edging the eastern sky and began to sing.

In those days, it was something of an old tradition for the King to go out and sing the sun up. Of course, everyone knew that he had nothing to do with it one way or the other. But it was a relic from even earlier times when the King was regarded as something akin to the gods and that his song did cause the sun to rise, and that he had a duty to sing it into the sky.

Every so often Bhagan would go out and greet the sun in this way. He had a good strong voice and some skill and we all stopped for the pleasure of listening to him. His song was of how Banashur sang the world into existence, how he created the green valleys and snow-capped peaks with the power of his voice, and how when he had finished he sang to the sun and convinced her to bathe the land with her light. Bhagan had it timed fairly well, and as he sang that last verse the sun pulled free of the horizon and flooded everything with pale gold, just like in his song.

We all stood there in quiet awe as the last note died away. Bhagan leaned over the rail and chuckled at us. “It’s a fine fair morning, don’t you think?” he inquired cheerfully. Not waiting for a response, he sauntered back inside with a last warm glance over his shoulder at me.

 

That time I had agreed to spend resting at the Palace seemed to both rush like a mountain stream and crawl like an ant. The time I spent with Bhagan flew by when I wished it slower, and the time without him seemed to creep and creep. His presence was a warm distraction from that tugging at my mind that said _haste, haste_ until I could hardly sleep.

The night I left for Durgesh again, Bhagan said farewell to me in private. We said goodbye in the darkened garden, his personal one this time. “Come back to me,” he kept saying. “That’s all I desire, dearest Ajay. I would trade it all,” he gestured at the opulence that surrounded us, “to have you back safe and sound.” He touched his own ring where it lay against my chest, still hanging safely from my necklace. “That is your only task. Go and do what needs done and _come back._ ” Just before I turned to go he reached and plucked a blossom of night-blooming jasmine and tucked it behind my ear. I held him hard and wove my fingers into his hair and kissed him until we were both breathless. I was getting much better at it by this time.

“I’ll miss you,” I said helplessly. He gripped my shoulders and gazed into my eyes with the air of a man trying to memorize them.

“And I, you,” he said softly, his voice like rough silk.

 

Bhagan had no idea that he was my lifeline, that I would carry this memory with me into another world and rely on it to lead me home again. That he was wrong, about the paradise he could give me not being enough. The true paradise was here, was wherever he happened to be, his mouth so warm on mine and the smell of jasmine, not lilies, and I would not have left it for anything.

Anything but this.

As I made that journey again, I cursed whatever deity saw fit to saddle me with this terrible burden. My place was at his side as the King’s protector. But it seemed that _kismet_ had different ideas and that I must protect both at once. Or protect Shangri-La to protect him, him and all of Kyrat as well. It troubled me that I had failed to make him understand that, why I was so desperate to leave him. I also fully acknowledged that to his ears, I probably sounded like a lunatic, like a wild-eyed _sadhu_ spouting prophecy in the marketplace.

I had the distinct feeling that I could be pulled asunder, if I weren’t careful.

 

During the next few weeks we fell into a routine in which I travelled back and forth between the mountains and the green and friendly South. After that second trip Bhagan loaned me his best elephant, a war-trained, battle hardened beast named Hurli. Though I was nobly born of the House of Ghale I was no royal; only _mahouts_ and the royalty rode. I had not the skill to be riding about on elephants. But Bhagan had grasped the beast’s short gold-capped tusk, looked him dead in the eye and warned him that he’d roast him for our dinner if he even _thought_ about throwing me. And then patted his trunk with affection. For his part, Hurli seemed to heed the King’s warning and was the soul of patience.

Riding Hurli cut two full days off my travel time and so I didn’t complain, as it allowed me to spend more time with Bhagan. Also, between the King’s ring that I carried and the royal elephant under me, no bandit or fool would dare accost me and slow me down. As his ‘courier’ I could have sought shelter and food in any village I passed but I preferred the forests and fields, preferred being alone with my thoughts.

When I presented Bhagan’s letter to the _dhami,_ he was unsurprised as to its contents. “Hmm, well…it matters not. I doubt Shangri-La would even accept another now. It seems to have found the protector it was seeking in you.” It was always strange when the monks would speak of Paradise as if it were a living entity that had thoughts and feelings, but I suppose they were right.

Protect it I did, or at least did my best. The tiger and I waged a guerrilla war in that place, and as we travelled through it Shangri-La grew darker and darker, our enemies ever more plentiful and more determined. I discovered my fellow seekers and said a prayer for each of them. All I had known personally. All left behind those that grieved for them. There were twelve missing altogether; I made the thirteenth warrior, and if what the _dhami_ said was true then none were left alive. I still had several to find.

I held so tightly to the rope in my mind, and when I felt it start to fray I pulled myself back to Durgesh, back to the world I belonged to, and set my feet on the road back to Bhagan.

Though I would usually leave in the cool of the night I would try to arrive with the dawn. More than once, as I drew close to the Palace gates I could hear him singing, singing the sun up, his strong, fair voice rolling across the green fields. Singing me home, as my heart soared.

I would run to the barracks and hurriedly wash the dirt of travel and the white paint from me and go to him, the servants waving me perfunctorily through to his suite. They were well-used to my presence by then. I would find him reading or writing poetry with a cup of wine at his elbow, or playing the _sitar_ softly, or out in his fine garden enjoying the cool morning air. Once I found him deep in conversation with his little green parrot. The bird perched on his knee and seemed very interested in whatever he found fit to tell it.

I knew he was lonely. Much like me, he had been lonely for so long that he had ceased to feel it as keenly, but he must have felt it all the sharper when I left again.

I know I did.

I hurt for him, left behind in his gilded bower, always left behind. A gilded cage, it must have felt to him sometimes. He had ceremonial duties, and of course when Kyrat went to war he led the army mounted on his fiercest elephant, surrounded by his warriors and his retinue and his banners and all of that. But mostly, he was kept shut up in the Palace for his own protection. Even though Kyrat was more or less at peace, he still had many enemies that wished him harm.

So when I came to him, I was loathe to break his peace of mind. He would greet me with so much light in his eyes. “Tell me a story, Ajay,” he would say softly. “Tell me of all your adventures.” And I would tell him about the beautiful parts, the marvelous things I had seen. The waterfall that was as wide as the Palace was long, and how it had fallen up. Candles and butter lamps and braziers that lit themselves when I approached, beautiful temples and forests of blood-red trees. How I had _flown_ , buoyed by an updraft of warm air and swirling leaves. The golden bow I found there, set with gems that seemed to slow time itself.

What I didn’t tell him was that I should have died half a hundred times. That wave after wave of demons assailed me with arrows and fire. That I _did_ die, my blood all over the stones and indistinguishable from the water…and the pain of it was terrible. By holding fast to my memories of him I was able to come back to life, but every time I did so I wondered how much of myself I was losing. I held fast to that lifeline, the fate that bound us, with an iron grip but even so…I could feel my grip slipping. Every time I came back to myself in Durgesh it was that much harder to do so. I was so afraid that Shangri-La would claim me in the end, despite everything…and I told him none of it.

Bhagan suspected though. He never let on that he knew anything was amiss, but he was one of the sharpest men that I have ever known. As the weeks passed, his concern began to creep past that light in his eyes. I knew that fighting for Shangri-La had long taken a toll on my mind, but it began to take its toll on my body as well. The bones became more prominent in my hands, my arms and legs thinner than they ought to have been. I had always been well-muscled and strong, but I slowly wasted like someone ill no matter how much I ate. I knew that the lilies functioned as some sort of drug that helped me pass through the veil between worlds, and I also suspected that repeated exposure without enough breaks was beginning to affect my balance and my stamina. The climb up the mountain to that chamber was becoming harder, not easier as it should have.

What was the hardest though was the constant pulling at me, all but physical. Tugging and _wrenching_ at me to make haste, that time was running out. And it was, I knew it was, but human flesh has its limits and I had nearly reached mine. Paradise had grown dark and chaotic like it was plagued by a great storm and I sensed I was nearly at the end. That I must soon face that dark harbinger of iron and flame.

What sleep I did manage to get was restless and plagued by nightmare.

 

One night, those nightmares broke open the uneasy, unspoken agreement that we had built between us. I was with Bhagan when I accidentally fell asleep in his bed. I usually slept in the barracks for appearances sake, but that night I was so exhausted that I drifted off even in the middle of talking with him.

I woke to his arms around me and him in a frothing, towering rage.

He snarled like a mad animal. “How do I get there, Ajay? _How do I get there?!_ ” He all but bellowed it in my face. “I’ll go there myself, Kyra curse the thing…I’ll go there and _I will kill it myself!!_ ” I was so confused and more than a little alarmed, but he calmed himself enough to speak at a reasonable volume. “You were dreaming,” he said, with raw pain. “You were dreaming and you were so frightened. ‘The Rakshasa comes,’ you said. ‘The storm bird of Yalung.’ You said this with purest terror on your face…”

All of his muscles were knotted hard and there was such raw fire in his eyes that I nearly recoiled from him, even knowing it was not and never would be aimed at me. Such a contrast to the cheerful, gentle, often silly man that I knew. Now I fully understood his reputation on the battlefield as a terror to his enemies. I fully believed that if pure rage and iron will were enough to carry him to Shangri-La, why, he would have shown up ready to tear the Rakshasa’s wings off with his bare hands.

“Shhh, Bhagan,” I said soothingly, as one would with an animal apt to bite and stroking the plushy hair on the back of his head.  “I am fine, you see? Everything’s fine now. Thank you for waking me.” He stared at me, stared and then turned his head away.

“Liar,” he muttered. “Lies. You’re not fine. Nothing is gods-blasted _fine_. You…you’re killing yourself. This thing, it’s killing you right in front of me…” Something seemed to break in him as he pushed his hot face into my throat with a single, harsh sob. My chest ached to hear it. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me again…stay,” he murmured roughly against my skin. “Stay. Stay.” His tone changed as his hands cradled my face, as he looked into my eyes. Tears stood in his own, but he ignored them. “Stay,” he whispered, his breath warm against my ear, making me shiver. “Stay with me. Stay.” And when he slid one of his big hands down my chest, down my belly, and then even lower, I didn’t try to stop him. I was already too far gone with need.

His hands on me felt like water soaking into dry earth, like those draughts of cool water he gave me that day. I met him halfway, maybe even more than that; I arched up into him and sought his tongue with mine and dragged the confining fabric out of the way. That first hot slide of him, his length against mine was…I didn’t have words for it, so different than how my own hand felt. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and hung on, rutted against him in pure instinct, and when the pleasure that we built between us coalesced and overflowed we both cried out together, went rigid and panting against each other as the servants in the next wing pretended not to hear us.

 

I laid there in his big bed and listened to the gentle night sounds, the soft call of insects out in his garden, the soft sound of his sleeping breaths. I rolled over to face him and stroke his hair. To memorize his features in the dim light of the oil lamp. I moved closer to bury my nose at the juncture of his neck and freckled shoulder and inhaled deeply, memorizing this too. The scent of his drying sweat and the perfumed soap he used and our combined seed. I catalogued it all, armor for what was to come. He stirred minutely against me, settled again. I closed my eyes and swallowed and pulled away, made myself stand and fetch my sarong from the floor.

 

To leave him at his most vulnerable was the hardest thing I have ever done. Knowing just how much it would hurt him when he woke to find me gone. But I couldn’t heed his whispered plea, even though all his heart had been in it. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.

Even then, not even then could I break what tied me to Shangri-La. Nothing could have kept me by his side; not chains of iron nor chains of love could have held me. And I did love him. I loved him so, so much as I climbed onto Hurli’s back in the middle of the night, as I touched his ring, as I smelled him on my skin.

I waved to the night guards with their torches to let me through the gate, and as I steered Hurli out onto the road I hoped against hope that I wasn’t going to my death.

 

Hurli proved to be an invaluable companion during that last long run, even more than usual. I was so exhausted that it was slowing me considerably, as I came to more than once slumped down and near to sliding off his big neck. The next time it happened, I woke with his trunk wrapped firmly around my leg and him moving at a slow shuffle to ensure I stayed on. I didn’t have to guide him; he knew the way as well as I by now. I rubbed his trunk in thanks and was able to get a little sleep even as we kept moving.

Once I arrived at Durgesh, I was so drained that I couldn’t even make it all the way to the chamber; my legs folded under me and the monks had to carry me the last little way. Me, who had not yet seen thirty summers and had entered the warrior’s training at seven, had to lean on those venerable old men. I could sense their concern as well, their worry. They might not all have known exactly what was happening, but the _dhami_ at the very least knew the stakes. Knew we were at the end, possibly the end of all things. In the chamber, he clasped my hand and held the _thangka_ himself. “Kalinag, our hearts go with you,” he whispered as that light took me, now as easily as sliding into sleep between one breath and the next.

 

It nearly _was_ the end of all things.

The avatar of Yalung forced me to do battle on ground favorable to it, on the very top of an immense stone spire. The black sky was alive with forked lightning and booming thunder…and here it guarded the last bell. Like a metal effigy of a great eagle, it was immense and glowed in places like hot iron. Its mouth glowed even hotter with hellish light, like it had drunk molten metal. The feathers of its great wings beat the air with a sound of blades clanging together. My heart quailed in me, and I could feel my mind slip just a little more.

The tiger looked up at me with his cool green eyes. _Well, are you ready to do this?_ his gaze seemed to say. _All, or nothing._

“Bhagan,” I whispered, “My Bhagan, beloved…I am so sorry.” I whispered it into the hot wind, even though I knew he could never hear it.

And the tiger and I attacked as one.

The eagle demon swooped down on us with a bellowing screech and a stench of hot metal and slag like the wind off a forge. I heard the sound of its immense, whistling inhale and suddenly knew what it was going to do with a spike of dread in my heart. I darted one way, the tiger the other as the eagle belched a stream of flame at us. The tiger managed to avoid it but I struggled to beat the flames off myself as my skin blistered. It hovered in midair and seemed to gather the very lightning to its breast, and as it did it summoned more of its demonic kind. Guttural shouts surrounded us and it was difficult to see where they even came from in the dark, smoky air.

An arrow arched out of the darkness and clanged off the stone beside my very foot.

Wasting my arrows on the metal eagle seemed less than pointless. I turned and fired them at the smaller demons instead, who promptly fired back. I shot until my arm grew sore and still they poured out of the dark. The tiger snarled and destroyed them three and four at a time, bowling them over and tearing their throats out. He protected me as best he could but I was already badly burned, already bleeding from countless wounds…just as the great eagle opened its mouth again.

“No!” I cried…and fired a volley directly into the thing’s gaping maw.

The effect was instantaneous. I had expected the arrows to burn up uselessly in the bird’s flames, but it squalled and fell heavily to the stones, writhing in pain. A quick movement caught the corner of my eye and as I turned to face the threat a hurled knife thudded into me and sank to the hilt in my abdomen. Another slammed into my ribs, but that one skittered off the bone in a bright flare of pain.

I remember thinking it was funny that the wound in my belly, despite being far worse, didn’t hurt at all.

Things happened very, very rapidly after that. I ducked and tried to staunch the flow of blood as the huge metal eagle writhed and squalled, its metal plumage gouging and squealing across the stonework and adding to the general din. The heat it produced was immense, seeming to blister my very lungs.

The tiger turned and looked at me with sorrow it its eyes, and for just a moment it reminded me of Bhagan. Then I realized what it meant to do. “No, wait,” I tried to say and held out my bloody, burned hand to it, but it came out as a strangled whisper. The tiger turned, backed a step or two, and with a roar leapt into the demon eagle’s fiery gullet.

If it had been loud before, it was nothing to the sounds that came out of the Yalung thing at that point. The tiger ripped it apart from the inside and it _screamed._ White light blazed from its mouth and eyes and I recoiled as it exploded in a flurry of white smoke. The force of that explosion destroyed the other demons in clouds of ash, blasted out the still-burning fires, blasted the very storm away… and blew that strangling, confining chain off the very last bell of Shangri-La.

I should have felt a great joy, a euphoric happiness, triumph. I had managed to save everything I had ever loved. I had saved _worlds._ I had fully expected to feel these things, but what I felt was relief and terror mixed. For the thread that would lead me home, my memories of Bhagan were rapidly sliding right out of my mind, sliding like silk when I tried to grasp at them.

I was losing him. I was losing myself.

Bleeding from dozens of wounds and reeling from pain, I sank to my knees and curled myself around the bad wound in my stomach. My limbs felt as if they were moving through water, or mud, and the feeling only increased with the passing seconds.

With sharp, fresh horror, _I realized that time was slowing down for me._ I was trapped and I was dying and my mind raced in sheer panic, even as the now gorgeous gold sky above seemed to mock me.

“Forgive me,” I croaked out. “Bhagan, forgive me.” I tried to bend forward to press my forehead to the gritty stone under my knees, but I could no longer move at all, not even the twitch of a finger. My vision began to tunnel in towards the center, darkness creeping in around the edges.

I found that I couldn’t even close my eyes.

As I was trapped there on my knees and frozen outside of time, I realized that I could hear a voice in the distance. This didn’t make sense. I listened closely. Not only was there a voice, the voice was _singing._ Quiet at first, and then more and more loudly. It sounded like the song that called the world into existence, the creation of the white-capped peaks and green valleys, the trees and plants and animals, the first people.

Banashur, I thought. It’s Banashur. He’s here somehow, singing to the world. Even the thoughts were slowing in my head. It took much effort to think at all.

But when the voice sang to the sun, asking her to rise over the newly-made world, it was like that light flowed into my mind instead. Banishing shadow, making all sharp and clear. Illuminating the way home. His voice was leading me _home._

No, not Banashur. It wasn’t Banashur at all.

 

It was _Bhagan._

 

In the mountain fastness of Durgesh my eyes flew open as I sucked in a breath with a loud whoop of sound, my first in more than a minute. My chest heaved for air as my eyes rolled wildly. I was surrounded by a ring of faces, the brothers and the _dhami_ and…and there _he_ was, Bhagan’s hand warm and solid on the chilled skin of my chest. He was inexplicably dressed in rough homespun linen, dirty and with three days or so of dark stubble on his face…but he was _here_ somehow. I grasped his other hand as hard as I could, which wasn't very.

“It’s done, by Kyra…it’s done, it’s done,” I managed to croak out, and as he reached for me and held me close I burst into tears. I clutched at him and cried like a child, and in all the world there was only the safety and warmth of his arms, his arms, his arms.

 

It took awhile for me to regain my composure, but I sat quietly and sipped at the hot tea that one of the monks brought and was soon feeling much better. The warm solidity of Bhagan pressing himself into my side helped immensely, far more than the tea. Perhaps sensing that there were things we needed to discuss in private, the brothers had kindly withdrawn.

“I don’t understand how you’re here, but…” I entwined my fingers with his, beyond words.

“Dearest Ajay, I went on an _adventure,_ ” he said, almost gleeful. “I shall tell you all about it. It’s my turn to tell you a story, after all.”

And he did. It was nearly as wild as anything that had happened to me in Shangri-La. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was making it up.

He told me that after he had woken alone, he had indeed been hurt and upset…but he had been more worried than either and had decided to channel that worry into action. He took off the King’s amulet and his other jewelry and washed the kohl from his eyes, stood out on his balcony until he memorized the guard rotations…and slipped out the side door and was up and over the wall in a flash. “Oh yes, your King found it rather easy to escape his gilded cage! Plenty of finger and toeholds in that wall. We really ought to fix that.”

Once he was over, he had snuck through the fields under the cover of darkness until he found a farmer’s shack and stole their washing right off the line, leaving his own fine silks in its place. I stared at him. “Didn’t their dogs bark at you?” Every farm in Kyrat kept a watchdog or two.

He smiled. “I had tucked some dried meat in my sarong for that very purpose.”

Once on the road, it was simplicity itself, he told me. With a corner of the rough linen pulled up and over his head like a man shading his eyes from the sun, he was nearly unrecognizable. One would have to peer into his face closely to see his features at all. He stayed to the forests and cover when he could and drank from the little streams he passed, much as I had that first time. He never left sight of the road through the trees and made sure of Hurli’s tracks from time to time, reassuring himself that he was indeed following the right path. Travelling this way, running hard, he arrived just after I did…cold, dirty, hungry and footsore, but triumphant.

“What?” he said, seeing the look on my face. “I keep myself in excellent condition.” He patted his flat belly. While that was obviously so, his poor feet were not hardened to such a journey and were sadly cut and bruised. He had brought meat in case he needed to bribe a dog…but he’d not thought to bring a pair of sandals. That was my Bhagan, through and through.

The monks had brought him in and saw him fed and warmed and bandaged, never even asking who he was. They had assumed he was merely another wandering pilgrim…until he started asking about me. Their placid faces had dropped when they figured it out and Bhagan had laughed and laughed at his own cleverness…but he had stopped laughing as soon as they brought him to me.

“My boy, I may be in good shape, but by Banashur I thought my heart was going to give out on that climb. But finally I reached that chamber with all those lilies…how strange! And there you were, and the _dhami_ was there standing over you but his face was terribly worried. ‘We cannot wake the seeker,’ he said. ‘He has become lost to Paradise.’” Bhagan’s face twisted in pain. “You were so pale, and I couldn’t be sure you were even breathing. It certainly didn’t look like it. I reached out and touched you…and then an awful thing happened. I put my hand on your chest and I could _feel_ you leaving this world. Becoming less solid. Less _here,_ ” he said hoarsely, and shivered against me. “I didn’t know what to do, except I had the thought to sing to you, that the sound might help rouse you, and the first thing that popped into my head was that old song about Banashur. And while I did I thought to myself that I had been an utter fool for ever doubting anything you had ever told me about that place. I trusted you and believed you…but still I doubted. Never again.”

“Doubt or no, you came here and saved me. It worked; it was your voice that I followed back,” I whispered to him, and touched his face. “I was hurt…no, I was dying. But somehow, you _did_ know just what to do.” And he looked immensely pleased with himself, but I could see the shadow of fear still in his face. I badly wanted to take him to bed and soothe away that fear. Distract him and make him forget all about it.

Thinking of bed reminded me of the Palace, and that… “Bhagan, we must go! Three _days_ you’ve been gone. By all the gods…they’ll be ripping the country apart looking for you!” I stood up with thankfully only a little dizziness, and I pulled Bhagan up with me by our clasped hands. “We have to get you home before your idiot retainers decide to start a war.”

 

The _dhami_ saw us off at the entrance to the mountain tunnels and thanked us both again. I needed no thanks for fulfilling what _kismet_ had set before me; I was far more interested in the large bag of food that he gave us for the return trip, but Bhagan and I both politely clasped his ancient hands in parting. Hurli himself was more than ready to leave the mountains. He had decided that the monks were not to his taste and was suspicious of them. He kept snorting and stamping until he caught sight of Bhagan, and then it was all happy trumpeting and trying to squeeze him with his trunk. Once Bhagan climbed aboard the elephant was as placid as a little calf as he gave me a hand up to sit in front of him. Hurli could have carried an entire palanquin on his broad back, so two riders troubled him not at all.

I think perhaps all three of us were eager to go: although the high mountains have a stark and terrible beauty and the skies stayed mercifully blue, the bitter cold drove us on. Bhagan urged me to lean back against his solid warmth and wrapped a fold of his sarong about the both of us, and I think neither of us wanted to ever see Durgesh again.

While it was true that the Palace was surely in a terrible uproar over the escaped King, once we reached the warm and gentle lowlands it was so easy to let Hurli shamble along at a leisurely pace. So easy not to make haste for once, so good to be out and about in the countryside with him. Especially since he so rarely got to see it. He could come to no harm while he was with me. And he was certainly more than capable himself of ripping the ears off of any bandit or interloper that were foolish enough to try us.

To travel from the lofty height of an elephant’s back was a splendid thing, and we were able to enjoy just watching the fields and forests and villages flow by. Each soft, slow day was as a week, and we both cherished the time together. Sometimes we talked, about everything under the sun. Sometimes we said nothing for hours, comfortably quiet as we held to each other’s hands.

What had chained me to Shangri-La broke the moment the chains about the last bell had broken, and I was free. My heart was set free.

On the fifth day of our journey, we were finally drawing near the outer ring of farms and fields that surrounded the Palace. It was late in the season by then, that time of the year when summer has autumn on its mind and the sunsets seem to go on for half the evening. We watched the orange glow slowly make its way across the fields on the end of that last day. Nearly home.

“I’ve been thinking,” Bhagan said against my shoulder.

“Oh, that can be dangerous,” I interrupted him teasingly, and he swatted at my arm with a chuckle.

“As I was _saying,_ I wish to find the finest _thangka_ painter in Kyrat and hire them to create a splendid record of your adventures in Shangri-La. Something that we can display in the Palace. Something that you can pass down to your descendants.”

I stiffened minutely against him at the mention of descendants. “I think it sounds wonderful, but…” He somehow knew what concerned me, what I was going to say before I had the thought fully formed: _descendants means getting children and children means marrying and how does what we have fit into all of that?_

“That brings me to my second thought.” He smiled but it was a little shy, which took me aback. Shyness was hardly an emotion I was accustomed to seeing from him. “Ajay of the noble House of Ghale, Kalinag of the King…would you accept if I named you my heir?”

I thought this over, my brow furrowing. There were only two ways I could become the King’s chosen heir, since we were not related. If I were a woman I could be his consort, or he could adopt me as one would with a child. Considering what we did before I left, what we had _been_ doing all this trip, learning each other's bodies in the velvety summer dark, I doubted this second scenario was what he meant.

“How would that…”

He waved a hand airily, as he often did when a problem presented itself that he was sure could be resolved merely because he was the King and desired it to be so. “Never worry about the details, beloved. You can be my…wife? Husband?” His own brow furrowed in thought, and then smoothed again. “Oh, it matters not, let the scribes write it up however they wish. The _dhami_ owes me a favor…the least he could do is perform the ceremony.  We can figure it all out.” When I said nothing for long seconds, he cocked his head a little. “You’ve been quiet. Is this…perhaps I was too presumptuous.”

I sighed as if put-upon. “I may give you an answer, if you were not always interrupting me.” I said it sharply, but I could tell he knew I was merely teasing him. This time, I could feel his smile against my hair.

“Stay,” he murmured. “Stay with me.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Always.”

 

I had no illusions that Shangri-La would stay safe forever. I had nearly killed myself to save it, but I also knew that while Yalung existed it could never be entirely free from danger. But it wouldn’t be right for it to be. Darkness and light must balance; for every Banashur a Yalung must exist. Else, how are we to appreciate the sun on our faces after the long night?

No, I knew that the journey and battle I went through would someday again become the duty of a seeker, someone in the unknowable future. With any luck, Shangri-La would again choose one of my own line, my own House. A fine young warrior ready to take up arms and defend Paradise from what would harm it, just like their honored forbearer. If they were destined to take up that mantle, I hoped that they would also be destined to have someone like my Bhagan to stand with them. Someone to be their light in dark places. Someone to be their anchor, their rope, their lifeline.

Someone to sing them home.

 

End

 

***

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments/suggestions/critiques welcome!


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